Be holy. Be perfect. Be children of your heavenly father. The spirit of God dwells in you. You are the temple of God…
The various liturgical readings this week come together around a common thread concerning the necessary holiness of the Spirit-filled disciple, and of how that holiness is manifest as a reflection of the loving-kindness of God. Can the sudden mad rush to post-human or trans-human existence we find Western civilization engulfed in be enlightened by reflection on this call of God to be holy/perfect/complete?
7th Week in Ordinary Time, Year A:
- 1st Reading: Leviticus 19:1–2, 17–18: “Be holy, for I, the LORD, your God, am holy.”
- Response: Psalm 103:8a: “The Lord is kind and merciful.”
- Psalm: Psalm 103:1–4, 8, 10, 12–13: “He redeems your life from destruction, crowns you with kindness and compassion.”
- 2nd Reading: 1 Corinthians 3:16–23: “If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy that person; for the temple of God, which you are, is holy.”
- Gospel Acclamation: 1 John 2:5: “Whoever keeps the word of Christ, the love of God is truly perfected in him.”
- Gospel: Matthew 5:38–48: “So be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
In the Leviticus reading, God commands loving one’s neighbor as oneself as an antidote to vengeance, and explicitly identifies such love with Godliness. When He says: “Be holy, for I, the LORD, your God, am holy”, He is saying: Be Godly, for you are God’s. And to be Godly is to practice loving-kindness.
In the Responsorial Psalm, we spend a few minutes reflecting on that very thing: “The Lord is kind and merciful.”
In the Gospel reading, Jesus famously expands upon the command of love for neighbor to include even the love of one’s enemies, challenging his followers to be more Godly than tax collectors and pagans, who undoubtedly share love for those already close to them. He concludes the teaching by calling his followers to perfection, but it is a perfection, like the holiness called for in Leviticus, which serves as a reflection of (and participation in) God the Father: “So be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
The Greek term being translated as “perfect” is a derivative of telos, the term used to refer to the “end” or purpose or final destination of something. It refers to perfection insofar as that entails completion, and a lack of nothing necessary to becoming fully its true self. For those with the knowledge of the faith revealed in Christ, the perfection or end or destination or telos of the human person is known to be eternal life in Christ Jesus. That perfection is thus Godliness, or holiness. Yet, in the parallel passage of this teaching contained in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus tells us: “Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful.” (Lk 6:36, RSV2CE). So again we are reminded that the perfection of holiness is manifest in loving-kindness: first in God, then in those who would be His. In its primary terms, this was couched in the Law as loving one’s neighbor as oneself. And in Christian revelation it is couched as accepting and manifesting one’s own destiny in the holiness of God. Today’s Gospel Acclamation insists that such a destiny is arrived at in clinging to Christ: “Whoever keeps the word of Christ, the love of God is truly perfected in him.” (1Jn 2:5)
Countering this teaching of becoming all that God has created us to be, however, is the modern craze of self-repudiation, seen in everything from bodily defacing tattoos to vain cosmetic surgery to the embrace of homosexualism as an “identity” to what one can only hope would be the final absurdity of deluded self-creation encountered in gender transition ideology. This refusal to see the meaning of one’s life (or of life itself) in the divine giveness of existence also lies at the heart of much of the moral argument for abortion: the fiction that a baby doesn’t exist unless and until her mother wills her to be a baby. Self-repudiation and self-creating might appear to be opposites at first blush, but they are only two sides of the same coin: that of rejecting the givenness of being, the rejecting of reality and instead demanding assent to the falsehood that one possesses the power to establish and define oneself.
Indeed, this rejection of reality is precisely what grounds the notorious assertion made by Justice Kennedy in Casey: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” Kennedy’s logic is completely perverted. What the light of faith and enlightened reason instead reveal is that at the heart of liberty is the right to encounter and know the truth concerning existence, meaning, the universe, and of the mystery of human life – and the right to act upon that truth.
The reading from Paul’s 1st Letter to the Corinthians provides both confirmation and warning concerning the importance of the free embrace of God’s gift of life among believers, who inherit not just the life of mankind (i.e. Adam), but also the life of God in Christ: “Do you not know that you are the temple of God,
and that the Spirit of God dwells in you? If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy that person; for the temple of God, which you are, is holy.” (1Cor 3:16-17) Our lives (i.e. our selves) are not our own, but are given as real gift from God, and the repudiation of the real gift in preference for a concocted imaginary substitute can ultimately be nothing but an act of self-destruction.